STFM Plans to Change the Future through Premedical School Recruitment

STFM has taken the lead in the family organizations on Recommendation #8 of the Future of Family Medicine report, namely “To promote a sufficient family medicine workforce.” As the FFM educational programming is woven into all STFM-sponsored conferences this year, we must now consider how we take on phase 2, “to initiate premedical school recruitment.”

Now how do we do this? How do we affect the pipeline of students into family medicine before they enter medical school? Maybe we have been too passive about the recruitment into medical school. We need an intensive, personal, public relations drive by each STFM member to find 2 or 3 more of us, for the future, recruited by us from the ranks of the children and teens and young adults in the communities we serve. We guide them and mentor them and then they join us and replace us as family physicians in the community. This is particularly important if we practice with medically underserved and other vulnerable populations, since we see yearly that, with rare exception, the children in these communities have little chance of entering medical school.

Suppose each and every family physician and educator took this on as his or her personal crusade, to fill the next generation? It seems daunting, but romantic, and yet pragmatic. We have been drawn to family medicine out of a sense of mission. Now it is time for us to pass on and rekindle that passion that drove us into this marvelous patient care field that cares for families, for communities, for whole people.

So STFM will take on several activities: (1) We will collect stories as we survey you about your current mentoring activities or those of your mentors. (2) We will survey you to find out about existing pipeline programs. (3) We will create a campaign to stimulate mentoring activities by family physicians and teachers of family physicians. (4) We will develop a toolkit with resources to support your mentoring and role modeling activities with students and schools, from grade school to college.

You can keep track of STFM’s FFM activities on the STFM Web site at http://www.stfm.org/ffm/updates.htm.

• © 2006 Annals of Family Medicine, Inc.